A rock book I have never ever heard of before, by a writer I never heard of before - until this moment.
Published 1976.
After this book, David Downing switched to fiction, writing s.f., alternative history, spy fiction, etc
I wonder if Future Rock's any cop? Hard to say from this review by CSM.
CSM is one of the NME writers (see also Mick Farren) who often wrote about s.f. writers in the paper (e.g. Ballard) and could have made a fair stab at a tome about the science fiction and rock nexus. (Farren of course wrote s.f. pulp novels by the dozen).
Dunning's book reminded me a bit of this cat Lou Stathis who wrote about music for Heavy Metal - not about heavy metal but about a continuum of sci-fi rock that includes Eno, Fripp, Bowie, Roxy, but also Chrome, Devo, Ubu, Ultravox, The Normal, Gary Numan etc. He called it "rok"
How "Future Rock" looked in the late Sixties - from Lillian Roxon's encyclopedia .
Not bad from Lillian Roxon! (Great nominative determinism there.) Electronic music and its organic backlash, the USofA as an influence, the death of vinyl: all pretty accurate. And predicting mash-up culture as a hot trend in 2001 is positively prescient.
ReplyDeleteBut again with the aleatory / infinitely varied stuff! You argue it’s a violation of what humans instinctively want from art, and that’s probably right. But it feels like there is an almost equally strong urge to make it happen!
She was wildly wrong about gathering with a group of strangers to hear music, too. That is one of the main things that people do still want.
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